What a Brain can do?

"The future (of the) brain seems, at this point, to be determined by the opposition between organic and cybernetic. We might employ Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology to say that while the human brain is deterritorialized onto the circuitry of the cybernetic brain, the cybernetic brain is simultaneously reterritorized onto the human brain. Consequently, the human brain has begun to wander through the wider circuits and pathways of the computer—even to the point where the distinction between human and cybernetic is blurred, if not dissolved altogether. Nevertheless, the human still tries to conceive of this relationship between the two brains according to an earlier former-matter distinction, by which it would appear that the human brain was simply employing the cybernetic brain as a path to its own actualization. Thus, there is more than a vestige of Hegelianism remaining in contemporary scientific narratives of the brain, in which Spirit (or Mind) takes a circuitous path of externalization in order to achieve a final identification between the actualized brain and the ideal that is potential in matter. We maintain, rather, that the mind is only the “ghost in the brain,” the sensory-motor double that has taken control of thinking but that thought is always catching the image of, like a strange spirit whose haunting we only dimly perceive. In neuroscience and the philosophy of mind, one usually finds the question of the cybernetic brain treated in terms of the possibility of artificial intelligence. For instance, the question arises as to whether it would be possible to create an intelligent machine (i.e., a “conscious” machine). But isn’t this the most feeble means of imagining the brain, determining its capacities and powers according to an organic (“human”) configuration? Deleuze is fond of Spinoza’s claim that “we do not know what a body can do,” but we are no closer to knowing what a brain can do when we reduce even its cerebral productions to reproductions, to making a “brain like our own.” Two dangers belong to this desire: the creation of a “disciplinary brain,” and the production of a new unconscious brain." 

GREGG LAMBERT AND GREGORY FLAXMAN 
full article at the Artbrain.org

Mutual Core

What you resist persists,
nuance makes heat
To counteract distance I know you gave it all,
Offered me harmony if things were done your way.
My Eurasian plate subsumed, Forming a mutual core

This eruption undoes stagnation.
You didn't know I had it in me,

An exhibition of plunder

The Banal

Praise be to Nero’s Neptune.
The Titanic sails at dawn.
And everybody’s shouting
“Which Side Are You on?”
(Bob Dylan: “Desolation Row”, 1966)

If one did not know that the media constantly exaggerates, one could almost conclude – as the Süddeutsche Zeitung has – that the Venice Biennale of Architecture really is the world’s most important architecture exhibition.

However, I believe that the word “exhibition” is not intended to describe an exhibition in this case, rather that the notion only designates the event per se. In other words an industry meeting, like a product fair. Other critics fail to even question the purpose of the exhibition, rather they immediately conclude that the coming together, the meeting, the networking is the key aspect. That’s that!

I would like to maintain at this juncture that the meaning of the Venice Biennale of Architecture for theoretical arguments has been increasingly losing significance since its beginnings with the Strada Novissima by Paolo Portoghesi in 1980. Even the personal significance for the participants is very low when compared to the Art Biennale. So let us not deny the truth. This event is an expensive danse macabre. In a city of plunder (an exhibition of plunder) hordes of tourists (architects) roll along broken infrastructure in order to satisfy their petit bourgeois desire for education (in the case of the architects: vanity, envy, schadenfreude, suspicions). Even the glamour that the visitors are supposed to feel is staid and faked by the media for whom a star architect is like a film star.

In truth it is all hollow, arduous, exhausting, bleak and boring. It is no longer about lively discussion and criticism of topics in contemporary architecture, but rather about empty, conservative and perhaps populist shells that are charged with feigned meaning. What a great Architecture Biennale it would have been had they established forums and put out themes which would have provided a chance to look behind the scenes at the decision-making, instead of boring exhibitions. Take for example the dispute about the train station in Stuttgart. The reasons for the cost explosion for prominent buildings such as, for example, the Elbe Philharmonic Hall. The political arguments about mosques and minarets, in other words the disputes about the localisation of an idea. Why the market for single-family homes in the USA has collapsed and how power politics is conducted through settlement architecture. These topics would be worthy of discussion – not who is and who is not a star architect.

However, instead of that we face: “People Meet in Architecture” and now “Common Ground”. In other words: compromise. It cannot get any worse!

This situation conjures an image of the Venetian carnival – one can imagine all the architects in Pierrot costumes surrounded by masked critics and dancing the Dance Banale, or, even better, the architects are playing on a sinking gondola like erstwhile the orchestra on the Titanic playing their last song, while outside in the real world our leaky trade is sinking into powerlessness and irrelevance. This is because politicians and project managers, investors and bureaucrats have been deciding on our built environment for a long time now. Not the architects.

While in Russia artists are stubbornly resisting the authoritarian regime, the current director of the Architecture Biennale considers these characteristics to be obstacles for our profession and he explains in an interview that space must be taken from the genius. One would have to show him Pussy Riots in order for him to finally understand our society.

Furthermore, I consider that the Venice Biennale of Architecture needs to be reorganised.

Wolf D. Prix / COOP HIMMELB(L)AU

source: dezeen and Coop Himmelb(l)au

Brian Massumi + Erin Manning. Coming Alive in a World of Texture. 2010 - YouTube

Brian Massumi + Erin Manning. Coming Alive in a World of Texture. 2010 - YouTube

Beat Generation

This Is The Beat Generation

  "Its members have an instinctive individuality, needing no bohemianism or imposed eccentricity to express it. Brought up during the collective bad circumstances of a dreary depression, weaned during the collective uprooting of a global war, they distrust collectivity. But they have never been able to keep the world out of their dreams. The fancies of their childhood inhabited the half-light of Munich, the Nazi-Soviet pact, and the eventual blackout. Their adolescence was spent in a topsy-turvy world of war bonds, swing shifts, and troop movements. They grew to independent mind on beachheads, in gin mills and USO's, in past-midnight arrivals and pre-dawn departures. Their brothers, husbands, fathers or boy friends turned up dead one day at the other end of a telegram. At the four trembling corners of the world, or in the home town invaded by factories or lonely servicemen, they had intimate experience with the nadir and the zenith of human conduct, and little time for much that came between. The peace they inherited was only as secure as the next headline. It was a cold peace. Their own lust for freedon, and the ability to live at a pace that kills (to which the war had adjusted them), led to black markets, bebop, narcotics, sexual promiscuity, hucksterism, and Jean-Paul Sartre. The beatness set in later.


 It is a postwar generation, and, in a world which seems to mark its cycles by its wars, it is already being compared to that other postwar generation, which dubbed itself 'lost'. The Roaring Twenties, and the generation that made them roar, are going through a sentimental revival, and the comparison is valuable. The Lost Generation was discovered in a roadster, laughing hysterically because nothing meant anything anymore. It migrated to Europe, unsure whether it was looking for the 'orgiastic future' or escaping from the 'puritanical past.' Its symbols were the flapper, the flask of bootleg whiskey, and an attitude of desparate frivolity best expressed by the line: 'Tennis, anyone?' It was caught up in the romance of disillusionment, until even that became an illusion. Every act in its drama of lostness was a tragic or ironic third act, and T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land was more than the dead-end statement of a perceptive poet. The pervading atmosphere of that poem was an almost objectless sense of loss, through which the reader felt immediately that the cohesion of things had disappeared. It was, for an entire generation, an image which expressed, with dreadful accuracy, its own spiritual condition.


 But the wild boys of today are not lost. Their flushed, often scoffing, always intent faces elude the word, and it would sound phony to them. For this generation lacks that eloquent air of bereavement which made so many of the exploits of the Lost Generation symbolic actions. Furthermore, the repeatedinventory of shattered ideals, and the laments about the mud in moral currents, which so obsessed the Lost Generation, do not concern young people today. They take these things frighteningly for granted. They were brought up in these ruins and no longer notice them. They drink to 'come down' or to 'get high,' not to illustrate anything. Their excursions into drugs or promiscuity come out of curiousity, not disillusionment.


 Only the most bitter among them would call their reality a nightmare and protest that they have indeed lost something, the future. For ever since they were old enough to imagine one, that has been in jeapordy anyway. The absence of personal and social values is to them, not a revelation shaking the ground beneath them, but a problem demanding a day-to-day solution. How to live seems to them much more crucial than why. And it is precisely at this point that the copywriter and the hotrod driver meet and their identical beatness becomes significant, for, unlike the Lost Generation, which was occupied with the loss of faith, the Beat Generation is becoming more and more occupied with the need for it. As such, it is a disturbing illustration of Voltaire's reliable old joke: 'If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him.' Not content to bemoan his absence, they are busily and haphazardly inventing totems for him on all sides.


 For beneath the excess and the conformity, there is something other than detachment. There are the stirrings of a quest. What the hipster is looking for in his 'coolness' (withdrawal) or 'flipness' (ecstasy) is, after all, a feeling on somewhereness, not just another diversion. The young Republican feels that there is a point beyond which change becomes chaos, and what he wants is not simply privelege or wealth, but a stable position from which to operate. Both have had enough of homelessness, valuelessness, faithlessnes."


This is the Beat Generation: Manifesto by John Clellon Holmes

Only to look for new weapons

"There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons." (Deleuze 1992, p4) 

"If the morphology of weapons has to undergo a revolution in the War on Terror, thta revolution can only take place through mrophing into dust and spores, providng weapons with cutting edge compatibility with the sociopolitical sphere, belief-dynamics, people and geograpgy of war." (Negarestani 2008 , p95)

Xenakis: Formalized Music

“I originated in 1954 a music constructed from the principle of indeterminism; two years later I named it ‘Stochastic music.’ The laws of the calculus of probabilities entered the composition through musical necessity… But other paths also led to the same stochastic cross-roads – first of all, natural events such as the collision of hail or rain with hard surfaces, or the song of cicadas in a summer field. These sonic events are made out of thousands of isolated sounds; this multitude of sounds, seen as a totality, is a new sonic event. This mass event is articulated and forms a plastic mold of time, which itself follows aleatory and stochastic laws. If one then wishes to form a large mass of point-notes, such as string pizzicati, one must know these mathematical laws, which in any case, are no more than a tight and concise expression of a chain of logical reasoning.


 Everyone has observed the sonic phenomena of a political crowd of dozens or hundreds of thousands of people. The human river shouts a slogan in a uniform rhythm. Then another slogan springs from the head of the demonstration; it spreads towards the tail replacing the first. A wave of transition thus passes from the head to the tail. The clamor fills the city, and the inhibiting force of voice and rhythm reaches a climax. It is an event of great power and beauty in its ferocity. Then the impact between the demonstrators and the enemy occurs. The perfect rhythm of the last slogan breaks up in a huge cluster of chaotic shouts, which also spreads to the tail. 


 Imagine, in addition, the reports of dozens of machine guns and the whistle of bullets adding their punctuations to this total disorder. The crowd is then rapdily dispersed, and after sonic and visual hell follows a detonating calm, full of despair, dust and death. The statistical laws of these events, separated from their political or moral context, are the same as those of the cicadas or the rain. They are the laws of the passage from complete order to total disorder in a continuous or explosive manner. They are stochastic laws. Here we touch on one of the great problems that have haunted human intelligence since antiquity: continuous or discontinuous transformation…. Transformation”


 Iannis Xenakis Formalized Music 1955

Far Eastern Marxism and the re-Hegelianized Western Marxism

"The Superiority of Far Eastern Marxism. Whilst chinese materialist dialectic denegativizes itself in the direction of schizophrenizing systems dynamics, progressively dissipating top-down historical destination in the Tao-drenched Special Economic Zones, a re-Hegelianized æwestern marxism' degenerates from the critique of political economy into a state-sympathizing monotheology of economics, siding with fascism against deregulation. The left subsides into nationalistic conservatism, asphyxiating its vestigial capacity for æhot' speculative mutation in a morass of æcold' depressive guilt-culture. [[ ]] Neoconservatism junks palaeorevolutionism because it understands that postmodern or climaxed-cynicism capital is saturated by critique, and that it merely clocks-up theoretical antagonism as inconsequential redundancy. Communist iconography has become raw material for the advertising industry, and denunciations of the spectacle sell interactive multimedia. The left degenerates into securocratic collaboration with pseudo-organic unities of self, family, community, nation, with their defensive strategies of repression, projection, denial, censorship, exclusion, and restriction. The real danger comes from elsewhere.


[[ ]] Hot revolution. æ[W]hich is the revolutionary path?' Deleuze and Guattari ask: Is there one? 


- To withdraw from the world market, as Samir Amin advises Third World countries to do, in a curious reversal of the fascist æeconomic solution'? Or might it go in the opposite direction? To go still further, that is, in the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialization? For perhaps the flows are not yet deterritorialized enough, not decoded enough, from the viewpoint of a theory and practice of a highly schizophrenic character. Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to æaccelerate the process,' as Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is that we haven't seen anything yet. [DG1:239-40]. 


 As sino-pacific boom and automatized global economic integration crashes the neocolonial world system, the metropolis is forced to re-endogenize its crisis. Hyper-fluid capital deterritorializing to the planetary level divests the first world of geographic privilege; resulting in Euro-American neo-mercantilist panic reactions, welfare state deterioration, cancerizing enclaves of domestic underdevelopment, political collapse, and the release of cultural toxins that speed-up the process of disintegration in a vicious circle. A convergent anti-authoritarianism emerges, labelled by tags such as meltdown acceleration, cyberian invasion, schizotechnics, K-tactics, bottom-up bacterial welfare, efficient neo-nihilism, voodoo antihumanism, synthetic feminization, rhizomatics, connectionism, Kuang contagion, viral amnesia, micro-insurgency, wintermutation, neotropy, dissipator proliferation, and lesbian vampirism, amongst other designations (frequently pornographic, abusive, or terroristic in nature). This massively distributed matrix-networked tendency is oriented to the disabling of ROM command-control programs sustaining all macro- and micro-governmental entities, globally concentrating themselves as the Human Security System."



Nick Land: Meltdown

assemblage

agencement vs assemblage 

The Cybernetic Hypothesis

In an essay from 2001, the French collective Tiqqun speaks of what they call the cybernetic hypothesis: "[A]t the end of the twentieth century the image of steering, that is to say management, has become the primary metaphor to describe not only politics but all of human activity as well." The cybernetic hypothesis is a vast experiment beginning in the overdeveloped nations after World War II and eventually spreading to swallow the planet in an impervious logic of administration and interconnectivity. What are the origins of the cybernetic hypothesis, and what are its futures? This workshop offers a media archeology of cybernetics through an exploration of nineteenth-century chronophotography, the history of the pixel, developments in computer modeling, bit arrays and grid systems, and that most enigmatic cybernetic device, the black box. Instead of contributing to the many heroic histories of cybernetics that already populate the cultural imagination, this workshop aims to uncover an alternative history of digital systems via an examination of the aesthetics and politics of control.

Alexander R. Galloway (NYU) is a writer and computer programmer working on issues in philosophy, technology, and theories of mediation. He is author or co-author of three books on media and cultural theory, and his new book, The Interface Effect, will be published this fall by Polity.

source: Winchester Centre fro Global Futures in Art Design and Media 

spaces of coexistence

This means that the notion of architecture, the work of architecture realizes the metaphor as defined by Sloterdijk. One where we are always looking for spaces of coexistence.

Simulacrum

In contrast to Baudrillard's simulacrum Deleuze's definition has a positive charge. If for Baudrillard Simulacrum, as essentially the copy of the copy, the copy of a non-original something is an utterly degraded form, for Deleuze simulacrum is opposed to copy, it is the image without resemblance and acquires its positive charge by interrupting the relation between original and copy.


In Logic of Sense Deleuze uses the simulacrum to explain the pure becoming. "Pure becoming, the unlimited, is the matter of the simulacrum insofar as it eludes the action of the Idea and insofar as it contests both model and copy in once." p.4


image: Campbell's Soup Cans Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987) |Moma.org

Triolectique / Triolectics on Vimeo

CODE

| Culture of Digital Ecologies | CODE

exploring the nonhuman in the post-digital production of Cultures. New research cluster coming soon.

OOM / object-oriented materialism and Laurelle

Object-Oriented Materialism (OOM)

" Materialism is sometimes criticized on the grounds that we don’t have a well developed concept of matter. In my view, far from being a black mark against materialism, this is a point in its favor. In this connection, I’ve been increasingly influenced by Katerina Kolozova’s discussions and deployment of the thought of Laruelle. Among all that I’ve read on and by Laruelle, Kolozova’s treatments are the first that have helped me to see the importance and significance of his form of critique. Among other things, Laruelle locates a sort of circularity internal to philosophical thought wherein that concepts of that thought end up determining the real. Here the problem is that philosophy structurally becomes locked in a circularity that far from reaching the real, determines the real by thought. Viewed in light of this thesis, the absence of a concept of matter is a strength of materialism rather than a weakness. Were we to have a well developed concept of matter we would find ourselves locked in the correlationist circle, such that we end up claiming that thought and being are identical. The absence of a well-defined concept of matter indicates that while thought, like anything else, is material, matter is nonetheless radically alterior and foreign to thought. The concept of matter is not– as per Plato’s requirements in the Meno –something that we possess in advance, but is rather a moving target that grows with our exploration of matter over the course of history. It is not something that we have already, but rather something that we must discover."

Dumitrescu the spectralist

Watch "Iancu Dumitrescu - Cogito/Trompe l'Oeil (1/2)" on YouTube

make the accidental the essential

stratagem five: make the accidental the essential
In Ancient Greece, the sophists were consummate exploiters of the faults, disturbances and idiosyncrasies of language, its non-sense. Installing themselves within the cracks of language, the fissures which open up where one word could mean many things, two different words could sound exactly alike, where sense and reference was confused, sophistry sometimes humourously and playfully, sometimes with apparently more sinister demagogical intent, exploited the ‘semiurgical’ quality of language and the seething cauldron of affective charge it contained to make and remake our relations to the world. For this, history shows, they were vilified, slandered and excluded from the community of normal human users of language. Philosophy and the right (thinking) use of reason was the prime agent in this historical expulsion. By the genial invention of principles such as that of non-contradiction and entities such as rhetoric to absorb the excesses of language, philosophy not only created strong normative principles for communication arguably operating on a transcendental basis (recently rehabilitated by Jürgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel), it also created a perception of language and of logic in which faults, glitches and bugs started to be seen simply as accidents, trivial anomalies easily removed by means of the better internal policing of language. Short of being a two-headed monster or a plant of some sort, you could not possibly say one thing and mean two. The norms of reason precluded this: transparency should be the elimination of agonism, not its secret accumulation. But as the sophists knew and practised, double-speak was something which politicians did all the time, more or less knowingly, more or less well. Twenty-five centuries later, with the advent of deconstruction and other approaches, we discover that in fact double-speak is the ‘repressed’, disavowed norm of reasonx.

Towards an Evil Media Studies

the old, analytic way is replaced by new, synthetic one.

the old, analytic way is replaced by new, synthetic one.

A : Let's take an ecosystem - like a jungle for example. When you try to approach it, when you study an ecosystem, using top-down approach, you start with an ecosystem as a whole and then you begin dissecting it until you get to the final units, which are the animals and the plants. That is the method that science has used for 400 years now and it's called analysis or top-down analysis. The problem is that many of the properties of an ecosystem rise from the interaction between the animals - for instance the interaction between the predators and the preys, the parasites and hosts or between simbiots. When you dissect things and take them apart, the first thing you lose is these interactions. You reach the final units by dissecting things, but then at the end you end up with units that are separated from each other. In an ecosystem, society or any other system, many of the properties are what is called synergetic or synergistic properties, that are more than the sum of the parts. But when you do analysis, you end up with a bunch of units and then you want to add them up - everything that was more than the sum gets lost - almost by definition.

So, to complement analysis, we need synthesis, and that's what artificial life does. In artificial life, you do not analyze an ecosystem, you synthesize it. I we begin with several populations of virtual animals inside a virtual environment and set them to interact with each other, the synergistic properties of an ecosystem emerge from those interactions. So instead of using top-down, starting at the top of the whole ecosystem and working your way down to the animals and the plants, you start with the animals and the plants - at the bottom - and work your way up. The advantage is that you do not lose the properties of interactions because you created these virtual animals and put them together to interact with each other. So, an ecosystem should emerge from those interactions.

Another example would be a flock of birds or an insect colony. In an insect colony, the whole colony has a kind of swarm intelligence. The colony as a whole is kind of like a computer. One little ant finds food and then the others follow him as if the whole colony was an intelligent being. Or if you have a flock of birds - there are a few rules when flying ; keep the same speed as the bird next to you, if you're too close get farther away and if you're too far away, get closer. With those few rules - as long as you put enough birds together - flock behavior emerges. And the whole flock has a kind of gracefulness of its own. That is more than the sum of its parts, it's more than the sum of the birds.

Manuel De Landa and Karlo Pirc (Interviewer)

"Deleuze and Computers" - Alexander R. Galloway - YouTube

Can We Think Democratically? Laruelle and the ‘Arrogance’ of Non-Philosophy « London Graduate School

Can We Think Democratically? Laruelle and the ‘Arrogance’ of Non-Philosophy « London Graduate School